One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

Feedback Form Comments from Attendees of this session at Global Scrum Gathering Orlando, Florida

Fantastic presentation! The speaker was very engaging and energetic. The topic was very helpful and relevant. I am going to take this back to my team and use it immediately. He was such a dynamic speaker AND a lot of fun! What I loved was that this method was actually born out of a very real need he saw in his own standups, so it's not a superfluous practice someone just made up to sell playing cards. :D

Great energy and awesome transfer of knowledge. Great Hack!!

Speaker is energetic and enthusiastic to encourage interest and participation; gave us tools to track Sprint confidence levels - great takeaway for me.

Should be a keynote speaker. Great energy

Enjoyed the hands on aspect and the resources.

Great engaging and fun session!

Very enthusiastic! Great topic! Very relatable

This is the first session where I walked away with a new technique I could apply on day 1.

A really good session with take away lessons that can be implemented right away!

Great idea and love the enthusiasm!!

Thank you! A technique that I will use and share with the teams I work with. This ranks as the best session I have attended so far. Hope to see you present next year!

This technique will be a great addition to my standup!

Excellent presentation. Speaker was full of energy. The topic was extremely relevant. Excellent all around.

Most useful session yet with an immediate Kaizen style improvement we can implement tomorrow.

Favorite session. This was awesome! Provides great info to take back and use immediately! Love the animation of delivery!

I almost didn't go as this was under the mission control track and I've been doing scrum for 10 years. Glad I attended!!

Can't wait to share this technique with my teams!

Best session yet. I can put Standup Poker in place this week. Really appreciate his willingness to share with other too!

Easily my favorite. Wow! He was dynamic and compelling. And the content will change the way I do business. Huge hit. Thank you for scheduling this one.

Kalpesh limited his WIP perfectly - the group came away from a session on a narrow topic with good experience in a new "tool" to use in stand ups. Initially I thought the topic was too narrow but I am delighted to see how he used the time! Very effective session

Stand-up Poker is an excellent grass-roots oriented tool based on deep experience in the field. Great presentation. (Might have been better to answer the Q&A in real-time with a quick answer instead of parking it and allowing for more deep dive time permitting at the end).

Would have liked to attend more of his sessions. Great speaker

Great speaker. Will definitely try this technique on my team!

Great energy. Great message. Great applied participation in session. Immediately useful. Excellent!

I'm definitely using this when I get back home. It's something I already occasionally ask my team, but now we'll understand how to make it a regular and vital part of our standup!

The only session I attended so far with a practical takeaway I can implement immediately. Liked it wasn't in the abstract, rather had tactical things I can actually use.

Selena Delesie - How Managers Nurture Teams to Thrive

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager at any level fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What do managers do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there a place for managers in an Agile organization?

YES! There is a lot for managers to do, though they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication.

In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an agile manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization .

Mishkin Berteig - Launching an Agile Team with the Skills Matrix

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Participants learn the “Skills Matrix” technique for getting a new Agile team started and for getting established teams to leap to the next level of capability. This technique has been used for decades at Toyota to create a team development plan in a collaborative, visual way.

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

The stereotype of technical professionals as inarticulate, socially inept geniuses inventing problems to solve is unkind and inaccurate. Yet the Dilbert image persists. So do jokes like the one about the engineer sentenced to death on the guillotine, who watches the instrument of death malfunction, then tells the operators how to fix it.

Why do people make fun of engineers? Do people wired and trained to analyze and solve problems and focus on the mechanics of a situation frustrate those whose brains are wired differently? And how does the engineer’s way of dealing with individuals and interactions - that first value of the Agile Manifesto - sometimes get in the way of team collaboration and productivity?

In this interactive session, we'll show a little empathy for engineers and other analytical folk whose neurological wiring makes them seem different from the rest of humanity. We'll also explore how those with the engineering mindset can develop their own empathy and consciously adopt behaviours that amplify their value to their teams and organizations, make them more effective leaders - and make their own lives easier by positioning themselves for understanding. Join Sue in a lively exploration of what can happen when engineers and technical professionals shift their mindset from solving problems to creating impact.

You will leave this session with an appreciation of

How to make your ideas meaningful to others by taking their perspective

How shifting your language from "What?" to "So What?" helps people connect the dots

Why giving up the need to be smart may be the smartest thing you ever do

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Why do so many organizations struggle to put in place mature Agile teams that can apply proper Agile principles and deliver awesome products? Some people will say, “Agile is hard” as an excuse to not do Agile or to become frAgile. Well we think we have developed the “Secret Sauce” to rebooting any Agile team that just doesn’t seem to be maturing and we want to share it with you!

If you are thinking of scaling Agile across a large organization, then this talk is a must to attend to help ensure your teams have the right foundation. Organizations wanting to scale Agile must have a solid foundation of mature Agile teams who embrace the Agile values and have the right Agile mindset.

Over the years, as we have done Agile transformations in different organizations, we have seen common patterns that keep repeating. The most common pattern we found in our experience is that teams are frAgile. Too many either pretend to be Agile or don’t even know Agile is not a methodology, so organizations question the value of using Agile. Very often the confusion and frustration that comes with thinking that a team is Agile when they are not Agile, brings people right back to their old habits of command and control. Creating successful mature Agile teams is not sorcery, you need to discover the secret sauce!

In this talk, we will reveal our secrets on how to create a successful Agile-Scrum team in 5 sprints. Attendees will learn how we applied our secret sauce as we experimented with more than 30 teams and we refined the know-how. This recipe has proven to be successful in different organizations and teams delivering different types of products. Our Creative-Destruction approach goes through a human change process we labeled The Intervention Plan. The 5 steps are:

Step 1: Run in the rain

Step 2: Thunderstruck

Step 3: Cry over the M&M’s machine

Step 4: Open-up and look at the sun

Step 5: Removing the training wheels

And by using these 5 steps, attendees will discover the 5th Agile value!

Gil Broza - How to Get Your Whole Team Talking

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

"Agile has too many meetings." "Our meetings are a waste of time." "It's always the same two people talking while everyone else is on their phones or laptops." Indeed, meetings are often pretty bad… but they are also necessary. Agile teams can't fully implement the 3 C’s (communication, collaboration, and consensus) only by inhabiting an open space or using a messaging tool. However, it doesn't take much to make a meeting effective, collaborative, and a welcome experience for its participants. Come to this experiential session to learn 10 simple changes you can make -- without having to become a professional facilitator -- to make your meetings matter.

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Executive

Most adults have achieved a level of personal development that allows them to function effectively in their families, society and their jobs. Leaders need to handle more complexity and need to advance to a higher level of personal development to become effective in advancing an Agile transformation. "Reactive" adults are functional, but unable to manage the complexity of an Agile transformation. "Creative" (and higher levels of development are needed. This presentation examines a model of understanding leaders called the "Leadership Circle" and correlates key capabilities in the model to effectiveness in leading an Agile transformation.

Mishkin Berteig / David Sabine - JIRA is the Worst Possible Choice

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Agile transformations are exceptionally hard, particularly at very large enterprises. Many companies embark on adopting Agile practices yet fail to reap the benefits of being Agile. For example, focusing on the ceremonies or events of a particular methodology or thinking of Agile as another tool or process instead of realizing that ultimately being Agile is a dramatic shift in mindset and culture. The challenges of an Agile transformation are much more entrenched and compounded at an enterprise level where the difficulty of the transformation is proportional to the scale of the enterprise.

This talk explores using the concept of an Open Space as a mechanism to evolve the culture of the organization from a siloed command-and-control hierarchy with rigid roles, processes, and procedures to a more fluid collaborative agile environment embodying the agile value of individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

In this talk will share how to benefit from the journey of a transformation towards an Agile culture using example of applying Open Space across various groups at the Royal Bank of Canada.

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

We all learn from the past, but how many times does history repeat itself? Why do we forget to appreciate the important people in our lives and take the things they do for us for granted? Why can’t we improve our relationships in a safe environment free from judgement?

We set out on a journey to discover how a retrospective can be used in personal lives in an attempt to understand their impact outside of scrum teams. We recruited participants who were willing to try retrospectives with their partners, roommates, family and friends and share the results with us. The findings were slightly unexpected and quite inspiring.

In this session, we will share these findings, and take the attendees through some interactive activities to try retrospectives in their personal lives.

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

When it comes to scaling Agile, there is no one size fits all solution. Frameworks like Scrum and XP prescribe roles, events, artifacts, and rules that make it very clear how interaction should take place within a team. When we begin to add more teams to the mix, communication between teams becomes more complex. This complexity threatens to reduce our transparency and damage our culture. How can we share information, build our culture and work together, all while keeping with Agile values?

During this session Sam Lightowler and Jade Stephen will take an in depth look at the successes and failures of CBC Digital Operations when it comes to cross-team collaboration and information sharing. We will discuss what meetings and techniques have helped us build a one-team-one-product mindset, a sense of community, and a culture of Collaboration, Learning and Improvement. We will also discuss what we have tried in the past and how learning from those experiments helped us evolve into the agile-friendly and unified team that we are today.

thomasjeffrey - Looking at Value through the Lens Of Cost Of Delay

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Approached from an agile perspective, delivering value looks very different than when thinking from a traditional mindset. During this interactive workshop, participants will gain hands on experience on applying critical concepts to estimating value in a way that also drives adoption of an agile mindset. This session is based on material that I have used on numerous occasions to help enterprise business leaders reshape the way they think about value. Participants will use the following practices when estimating the value of future work:

Deliberate estimation of lead time ( your most precious resource) and delay time (your most toxic obstacle).

How to move forward with imperfect information through the use of explicit assumptions required to approximate value.

Using Cost Of Delay to put a price tag on time, creating an economic incentive to increase agility at the business level

I will start the session by providing an overview of the power of focusing on lead time and delay time over efficiency and throughput. I'll show participants how to use concepts such as explicit commitment points and delivery points to measure business agility, and discuss sources of delay, and means to eliminate sources of delay.

I will then discuss ways to quickly assess the value type and urgency profile of work, providing a means to quickly catalog the type of assumptions that require research and validation in order to conduct high quality conversation around the estimation of value.

Session attendees will be given the chance to estimate the value of work through exploration of a business value assumption model. Ill go through some of the key factors to consider when estimating value, and how to quickly compare value across epics and features using the assumption model approach.

The psychological factors that prevent people from estimating value will be discussed and participants will be coached through effective methods to overcome these factors including relative ranking, accuracy over precision, and explicit tracking and sharing of key assumptions.

After this I will give an overview of how to frame value in terms of Cost Of Delay. Ill present the audience with a way to put a price on the countless queues our work tends to go through. I will then guide attendees to to quantify their value assumption model according to the amount of value lost over time. Participants will use techniques to estimate units of value according to the opportunity cost incurred when work is blocked or left waiting on a queue. I will also show the relationship between different urgency profiles and the severity of Cost Of Delay.

For the final part of the session, participants will rank a backlog of their own work through CD3. Cost of Delay Divided by Duration takes COD and divides it delivery lead time to create a ranking mechanism that focuses teams on delivering the highest value in a given time period of time. I'll walk through how CD3 provides insight necessary to minimizing the impact of COD for a set of options, encouraging the breakdown of work into smaller batches, and prioritizing work essential to eliminating delay.

This session will highly interactive, and give participants practical, hands on tools that can help the business think in terms of getting to value with agility, acting as a gateway practice for deeper adoption in the future.

thomasjeffrey - The Agile Ecosystem - Changing the way we think about Organizing to Deliver Value

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

A key leadership responsibility in today’s enterprises is understanding how to create organizational structure that promotes agility. Most organizations think about their organizations as a hierarchy, with departments dedicated to specialist functions like marketing, finance, or IT. This hierarchy based model can make it very challenging for knowledge workers to collaborate with each other to the extent necessary to deliver value. Especially when you consider today’s environment of constant change

With agile becoming increasingly popular, the concept of creating structure based on cross functional self organizing teams is becoming increasingly popular. There are obvious advantages to this approach such as breaking down functional silos, moving employees closer to the customer, and motivating a diverse collection of specialist towards a common goal. Organizations often face challenges when moving from a hierarchical model to one based on agile teams, and they have encountered a number of very serious challenges.

Organizational designers often struggle with creating a model that is economically feasible,. The model does not always seem to lend itself to managing scarce expertise. A different type of siloing can occur, where discrete business functions or customer experience teams have very little integration with each other, this can cause crosscutting concerns to the organization to become forgotten, and create an overall loss of organizational cohesion. Team coordination and communication becomes a concern as agile deployment scales to larger and larger efforts.

Over the last several years I have paid attention to how others are deploying agile at scale, as well as catalog my own experiences in helping customers with changing their team structure to improve agility. The results are a set of patterns that describe different ways teams can be designed to provide effective services their customers, and collaborate with each other.

During this session I want to provide participants with a chance to use a set of defined team service and team linking patterns to design an agile ecosystem; a system of self-organizing, interdependent teams, a system that constantly evolve to organize around value. This session promises to be a hands on, in depth session where attendees will be able to develop a real world example of team organizational structure designed to improve agility in their context. I'll walk attendees through the steps necessary for designers to identify the teams and interactions required to deliver value as well as the the support structures required to enable those teams.

Participants will build a real agile team ecosystem that covers the following steps:

describing the services, clients, and capabilities of your teams, and organize them into higher order missions

Applying one or more team delivery patterns

Applying one or more team linking patterns

During this session I will facilitate ecosystem design through the use of an agile ecosystem design toolkit. I will use the toolkit to describe the details of each pattern, including when to use them and some of the benefits and trade-offs required.

Kalpesh Shah - Beyond User Stories : Take Your Team to Next Level of Awesome!!!

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Case Study

Intermediate

Great teams make great products, but what fuels this greatness? It's the common understanding and passion for the product but more importantly the singularity of purpose and the feedback loop and how the users are responding to the teams work.

The new world of product development is no longer about scope management and delivering the project on time and within budget but it's now more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

The dynamics of product development is changing. As more and more organizations are moving towards maturing their agile software development approach the traditional barriers of roles are being broken creating new opportunities and fostering a shift in the mindset. Instead of being tied down to scope management and delivering the project on time, Agile teams are focused and inspired by hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

In this case study we will go over how a portfolio of 12 SCRUM Teams adopted a more outcome approach and how they shifted their mindset from project delivery in Agile way to adopting the Experiment-Measure-Learn-Repeat loop which plays a crucial role in teams overall motivation, performance and moved from being SCRUM Teams to "Product Teams".

We will also see how we experimented with different team formats and how exposing the team members to different events and user research changed the way they perceived the information of the problem they were solving via features and user stories.

Stephanie Ockerman - Agile Beyond Work: How To Live An Integrated Life

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

As practitioners, coaches, and leaders, we talk about how you don't "do agile," but rather you "be agile." Agile is a mindset that is supported by values, principles, and science. A mindset is not something to be switched on and off. If we want to be agile leaders and fully experience the benefits of agility, the best way to practice is to integrate agile and leadership into all aspects of our lives.

In this workshop, Stephanie explores what she has learned incorporating agile values, principles, and practices into her life. She will share a framework to help you create your best integrated life: a life with joy, alignment, and fulfillment. This framework comes from what she has learned exploring and experimenting over the past decade, including a two-year travel sabbatical in Latin America, creating a more sustainable lifestyle, and a career evolution to agile coach and professional trainer.

In this talk, we will explore:

What does it mean to have an integrated life and what does agile have to do with it

How to identify what is important to you and align to your values and priorities

The importance of leadership skills and emotional intelligence

Techniques for maintaining focus, continuous improvement, and adapting to change

This workshop will incorporate activities for participants to get started defining their own integrated life.

Participants will walk away with a framework that can be applied to move towards an integrated life, resources to explore concepts further, and inspiration to live a remarkable life in our conventional world.

toddcharron - Status and Power Improv

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Two years ago I presented the story of a client in the US who underwent a very fast and aggressive transformation. Although it was ultimately successful, along the way, we nearly destroyed it all. The saving grace was a small group of courageous leaders who made some tough decisions to get things back on track, and continued to drive the progress needed to succeed. The success story was presented at TAC in 2014 and the near colossal failure story was presented at Agile 2015. We bring this amazing story together into a single talk with many important lessons.

Gino Marckx - Building powerful roadmaps

schedule 1 year ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Any organization’s ability to focus on what matters most to their customers is directly related to their ability to get valuable feedback from them. While more and more organizations embrace agile practices during the development of their services, they often lack in how they collect feedback and therefor don’t get the benefits they are after. After all, what is the upside to investing in being able to pivot, if there is no information available to guide the direction of that pivot?

The fact that many roadmaps leave little room for flexibility significantly contributes to this and building powerful roadmaps is a really hard task. How does one get feedback about a house without building it completely? How does one give feedback about a car without being able to drive it around the city for a couple of hours?

This session will provide you with practical techniques on how to build a powerful roadmap for your product or service, one that allows any organization to get valuable feedback from their customers. This workshop is based on ideas from the upcoming book ‘Thinking in Agile’.

Valerie Senyk - The Agile Voice (Speech as a Sensual Experience)

schedule 1 year ago

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60 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

The voice is an instrument of expression, and can be a powerful tool in any life endeavour. But many people do not know how to use their voice effectively. I will take people through a series of physical, vocal and speech exercises that help them free their voice from constraints, and use it with agility and confidence. The session will be highly participatory, physical and agiliciously fun!